


Twenty Questions

by battle_cat



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Backstory, Drugged Sex, Drunk Sex, Dubious Consent, M/M, POV Alternating, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Primo's past relationships featuring, and other less-than-ideal consent situations, canon-typical Primo homicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:21:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27681392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Leonardo has a sense that there are things Primo wants to ask, but even more than that, there are things Primo wants to tell. And so they are making a game of it, making each buried truth into a dare.
Relationships: Leonardo/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 24
Kudos: 134





	Twenty Questions

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in the same timeline as [Promises and Threats](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27293782/chapters/66685795). A few details will make more sense if you have read that fic, but it's not strictly necessary. This is post-canon, while the port is being built. Up to you whether this is before or after Leo knows that Regina knows. ;-)
> 
> I think it should be clear from the tags, but some of the flashbacks of Primo's past sexual experiences feature scenarios in which consent is uhhh compromised in various ways. I decided that none of them warranted a non-con warning, but let me know if there are additional things I should tag.

“First time you did anything with a guy.” Primo exhales a long column of smoke into the dark sky. “You go first.”

They are on Primo’s boat, at night, somewhere along the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea. There is just enough room on the deck for both of them to lie down next to each other on their backs, smoking and looking up at the stars.

If anyone asks Primo, he will say that the boat was a practical purchase, useful for dumping bodies, a use to which they have already put it several times. But it’s also nice for this.

For whatever reason—possibly nothing more than tonight’s particular mix of intoxicants—Primo is in a talkative mood. This is rare, and Leonardo knows if he comments on it Primo will stop, so he goes along with it as if this is something they do all the time. Because he has a sense that there are things Primo wants to ask, but even more than that, there are things Primo wants to tell. And so they are making a game of it, making each buried truth into a dare, because then it feels like something they are getting out of each other instead of something they are giving freely.

“It was a kiss,” Leonardo says.

Primo snorts. “Of course it was.”

“It wasn’t a _good_ kiss. Neither of us knew what the fuck we were doing. ‘Practicing for our future girlfriends,’ you know,” he says, although it hadn’t taken long for them to progress to things they wouldn’t be doing with any girlfriend. “That’s what we told ourselves, anyway.”

“How old were you?”

“Around fourteen, I think.”

“So it was someone in the village.”

“Of course it was; who else would it be?”

“Who?”

“Oh come on, I’m not telling you that.”

“Why not?” Primo turns over onto his side, head propped on his hand. The boat’s single lantern casts just enough light to see the mischief in his eyes. “I can keep a secret.”

“You know exactly why. Because he’s married now, with a nice family.”

Primo rolls back onto his back, one arm tucked behind his head. “I’ll figure it out.”

“You will not.”

“I will. Eventually.”

“Your turn.”

Primo takes a long drag on his cigarette. “I sucked off a drug dealer for some coke.” He says it like he’s bragging about it. Like Leonardo doesn’t know how to see right through that. “Made him yell my name when he came. It was hot.”

The dealer had not yelled his name when he came. The dealer hadn’t known his name, and Primo had known him only by a nickname.

He had _needed,_ and he hadn’t had any money. But he was resourceful. He’d gotten this far, alone in Rome, hadn’t he? And the person you needed something from always needed something of their own. You just had to figure out what it was.

“You know,” the dealer had said. “If the girls can’t pay, sometimes I let them blow me for it.” And so he had ended up on his knees in the bathroom of a shitty bar. The guy had reeked of sweat and cigarettes and too much cologne, and he’d put his hand on the back of Primo’s head so he couldn’t pull away while he grunted and thrust into Primo’s mouth. Primo could tell the man thought this was supposed to be degrading, but it was the hottest fucking thing he’d ever done. He’d started moving his head, wrapped a hand around the base of the man’s cock and stroked, and he could hear the guy laughing at him but he wasn’t the one with his dick between someone else’s teeth. When he made him come it was thrilling, the revelation that he could make someone want him like that, that this was something he could use to get what he wanted.

“Look at you.” The guy had his hand on Primo’s chin, tilting his face up. “What a good little whore you would make.” Primo was vaguely aware that he was being mocked, but it was hard to concentrate on anything other than the fact that he was harder than he’d ever been in his life.

He waited until the dealer left the bathroom, and he had the packet of coke tucked safely in his pocket, before he locked the stall door and jerked off, biting down hard on his free hand to keep from making any noise when he came.

Primo lights another cigarette from the last glow of his previous one. He grinds out the butt in the ashtray sitting on the deck above their heads, instead of just flicking it into the sea, and there is absolutely no reason Leonardo should find that little detail charming, but he does.

“First time you fucked a guy. Go,” Primo says.

He’s never told this story to anyone, but it’s not a bad one. It’s simple and sweet, and rather sexy, if he does say so himself. It’s a warm little secret he’s held onto for years, and, privately, cannot bring himself to be ashamed of.

“It was before I was engaged to Regina. Salvatore sent me to Reggio to deliver something. Money. I was shitting myself, being sent on an errand like that alone. I was nineteen; what the fuck did I know? After the handoff went smoothly, I was so relieved. I stopped in a bar for a drink before I went home. I met a guy there. Enzo. He was a sailor. You know how sometimes you look at someone and just know?”

Primo makes a noise to indicate he understands this, the sixth sense by which you find other people like you.

“He was a young guy, like me. Very handsome.”

“Like you?” He makes sure to say it like he’s teasing.

“Shut up. You want to hear the story or not?”

Primo makes a hand gesture to indicate _go on._

“The ship he worked on was leaving in the morning. I’d never see him again. And I thought, well, nobody will know.”

“Where’d you do it?”

“In the back seat of my father’s shitty old car that I’d borrowed for the trip. Like a couple of horny teenagers.”

“How romantic,” Primo quips, but something in his voice falls short of mocking.

“It was, though.” He still remembers it vividly: the way Enzo’s dark, warm eyes caught the little bit of streetlight shining into the alley they had parked in; the novelty of feeling his rough stubble against his chin as they kissed, the line of his throat as he rocked on Leonardo’s lap with his head thrown back. “It was like being in a movie. If they made movies about people like us.” 

He follows Primo’s example, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray and lighting a fresh one. “Then I drove home, and I never told anyone about it. Regina doesn’t even know.” He sneaks a glance at Primo, but can’t read whatever expression is on his face. “Your turn.”

“I told you,” Primo says, as if it hadn’t been more than a dozen years ago. (As if he has guessed, correctly, that Leonardo remembers that conversation with perfect clarity.) “It was at a party, in Rome.”

“You remember the guy’s name?”

Primo makes a derisive noise. “I barely remember the sex. I was blitzed out of my mind. Would’ve thought I’d hallucinated it if my ass wasn’t sore the next morning.”

The party was at Marco’s place. Marco, who’d escaped his strict family in Valencia and been living in Rome a year longer than Primo had. His Italian was still mediocre. Primo had offered to help him improve—he’d learned to sound like a Roman quickly enough when he was immersed in it—and in exchange, Marco taught him to pick tourists’ pockets.

Marco lived in a cavernous squat with an ever-rotating cast of inhabitants. Sometimes Primo slept there. Someone who maybe lived there had told him that the building had once been a department store, closed down during the war and never reopened. The place had very little furniture, but a seemingly endless number of pillows. Primo had passed out on a pile of them in a tucked-away corner midway through the party. He was very drunk and very high and he’d just needed the room to stop swaying for a minute.

He woke up because someone was playing with his hair. He’d been letting it grow out long, now that there was no one around to tell him he looked like a girl, and he liked it that way.

Someone was running their fingers through it, soft and repetitive. It felt nice.

Eventually he managed to turn his head in the direction the touch was coming from. It was a guy, maybe a few years older than him, with close-cropped dark hair, his pupils blown wide and dark to match Primo’s own.

“You’re pretty,” the guy said, from where he was stretched out on the pillows next to him. His fingers drifted down from Primo’s hair and brushed over his mouth.

He must have smiled, because the next thing he knew, the guy was right next to him and they were kissing. The guy’s mouth was warm and tasted like something alcoholic and sweet, and everything felt close and far away at the same time, his brain registering things a second after they were already happening.

Time slipped and then they were on top of each other, grinding, and he was very hard and he could feel the other guy was too, and the guy had his hand cupped around Primo’s ass, fingers digging in in a way that sent a shudder of pleasure up his spine every time he squeezed. “God, you have the best ass,” the guy breathed against his neck. “Can I fuck you? I want to fuck you.”

Time slid out of its groove again and the next thing he was aware of was being face down in the pile of pillows while the guy thrust into him in short, hard jolts. It _hurt_ and it was unbearably arousing and he felt flattened between the two sensations, helpless to do anything but dig his fingers into the cushion under his face and rut desperately against the one underneath his hips. He came and it made the guy on top of him groan and rabbit into him faster.

He woke up the next morning, still face-down in the pillows and crusted with come in unfortunate places, and with the worst hangover he’d ever had in his life. Someone had at least pulled his pants up over his bare ass, but hadn’t fastened them.

He got himself off to the fragmented memory of that night for months afterward.

Primo is staring up at the stars, face tilted away enough that Leonardo can’t meet his gaze. “I wished it was you, you know,” he says quietly, the swagger abruptly gone. “The first time. You would’ve made it nice.” He breathes out an extravagant cloud of smoke into the night sky. “I would’ve made sure to remember, if it was you.”

He waves a hand, the façade back in place. “Your turn. I’ve had two in a row.”

Leonardo already knows what he’s going to ask. He’s been saving this one. “Did you ever have a boyfriend, in Rome? Someone steady?”

Primo huffs out a laugh, and Leonardo is sure he’s about to declare that ridiculous. But then he says: “Once. For a little while.”

Leonardo waits.

“Vincenzo,” Primo says. “He was married, too.”

Vincenzo was probably twice his age, although he never got up the guts to ask. He was some kind of businessman, although Primo never asked about that either, and Vincenzo never volunteered the information. Vincenzo’s wife and children lived in a villa somewhere outside the city. He kept an apartment in Rome for all the nights he worked late, or told them he did.

Vincenzo had money, and he enjoyed spending it on Primo. Money for dinner at fancy restaurants and ordering wine without looking at the price. Money to take him to posh shops that Primo by himself would have been chased out of like a feral cat, but they took one look at Vincenzo with his sharp suit and nice shoes and expensive watch and offered them the private dressing room that had its own couch. Vincenzo never corrected people when they assumed Primo was his son.

Primo had a reliable place to live by then, renting a small, simple room from a nice old lady who thought he was out at all hours and always paid rent in cash because he worked at a bar. Vincenzo never met him there. They fucked in Vincenzo’s opulent, impersonal flat, or in his sleek car, and Primo never spent the night.

Vincenzo thought he liked hearing Primo talk about his life, but what he liked was the version of his life Primo had made up for him. He left out things like how he’d known, at fourteen, how deep you had to bury a body so wild animals wouldn’t dig it up. He left out all the petty theft and the nights he’d slept in doorways and the other nights he’d let someone fuck him so he could sleep in a bed instead. He let Vincenzo build an image of him, a plucky orphan who’d fled his narrow-minded village in a part of the country Vincenzo would never travel to, who’d been surviving in Rome on various odd jobs (some of which Primo had actually done, and others of which he made up), and was ever so grateful for Vincenzo’s monetarily-expressed affection and eager to return it by letting Vincenzo do whatever he pleased with him in bed.

Vincenzo was inordinately fond of fucking his mouth rough and hard, until he gagged, which Primo didn’t particularly like, but got used to.

(Vincenzo was also fond of cocaine, and always expected Primo to have some, although Primo sometimes bought it with the money Vincenzo gave him to take a cab home at the end of the night.)

It lasted most of a year. Then Vincenzo got a promotion, which meant moving to his company’s head office, in Milan.

“I’ve never been to Milan,” Primo said when Vincenzo told him. He was stretched out on the silky sheets, naked, his head resting on his folded arms. Vincenzo was sitting up against the headboard, smoking a cigarette. “I could come visit you.”

Vincenzo laughed. Then he looked down at Primo. “Oh. You meant that.” He gave him the look one gives a small child who still believes in fairy tales. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, dear.” He tucked a lock of Primo’s hair behind his ear. Primo wanted to slap him. “It’s been fun, no? Let’s not make a big deal of this.”

“Right. Of course.” Primo put on a smile. “I was only joking.”

Just before he left that night, Vincenzo reached into his wallet and handed him a fat stack of bills. “Here. I want you to be okay.”

Primo thought about spitting in his face, about bashing in his perfect, even teeth. He thought about slitting his throat, for thinking he could pacify him with a wad of cash before throwing him away.

He didn’t do any of those things. He said, “I’ll be fine.” He smiled, and he took the money, and he let Vincenzo kiss him, closed-mouthed and brief.

He thought about waiting until Vincenzo left the flat in the morning and then breaking in and robbing him. He thought about following him home to his big house with his nice family and setting everything on fire. He could kill them all. He could. He _should,_ for daring to humiliate him like that.

He didn’t. As he stewed, and drank too much, and thought about why he hadn’t, he realized he already knew the answer. Because it was his own damn fault, wasn’t it? For thinking someone like that would ever see him as more than entertainment. For momentarily confusing being _kept_ with being valued.

He did go out, a few nights after that last conversation with Vincenzo, get extremely drunk, and provoke the first macho asshole he could find into starting a fight with him. The smug idiot had no idea what he was getting into, and Primo wiped the floor with him. It felt great, breaking the guy’s nose, making him cough blood, making him beg for mercy and then keep hitting him anyway, leaving him in a heap in the grimy alley where they’d had it out. It felt fucking fantastic.

He didn’t kill him. He was fairly sure.

He pawned the expensive watch Vincenzo had bought him for his twenty-fourth birthday. He kept all the clothes, though.

He stopped letting people buy him things, after that. If he wanted nice things he would get them himself, even if he had to steal them.

Vincenzo had left him with one precious gift, though. He had taught him how to find the hidden places where people like them ( _fucking queers,_ he would have said if anybody asked) gathered to meet each other. Once you knew the way into one of these places, it was easy to find someone who knew another, and another. Bars with no sign on the door, the back room of a certain club on a certain night, unnamed spaces tucked away in apartments you needed a password to be admitted to. A whole hidden world, like the catacombs under the city.

It was magic. He became a familiar face in certain places, even if hardly anyone ever got his real name. Having access to drugs made him everybody’s friend. Sex was easy to come by, and very few people expected anything more than that. Everyone knew him but know one _knew_ him, and that was probably the best possible situation.

Primo has gone silent, and Leonardo has finally concluded that he is not going to say anything more without prompting. “What happened, with him? Vincenzo.”

Something twitches across Primo’s face—anger, or disgust, or maybe hurt; he can’t quite tell. “It didn’t last.”

He sits up abruptly. “It’s fucking freezing. Let’s go in.”

It has gotten cold, as the night deepened. Leonardo pulls his jacket around him and shivers as Primo steers the boat back to the dock. The port, lit up with construction safety lights and adorned with several towering cranes now, beckons them into its arms. The empire Primo is building—no. The empire they are building together, somehow.

Primo doesn’t look at him, concentrating on guiding the boat toward the little dock built for it away from the main construction zone, the night breeze blowing his hair in wild patterns around his face. (Leonardo spends a truly embarrassing amount of time thinking about running his hands through that hair.) If he has any more secrets to divulge that night, they wouldn’t be heard over the wind and the engine of the boat.

He can’t stop thinking about Primo’s brief fit of honesty. _I would have,_ he thinks. _I would have made it nice for you, if it had been me._

In the car, he tries to rub some feeling back into his hands while Primo lights up another cigarette.

“In the back seat, like a couple of teenagers, huh?” Primo says, his glance darting over his shoulder.

Leonardo laughs. “I’m too old for that shit. Take me to your place and I’ll fuck you in a bed.”

They stumble into the darkened bedroom, in Primo’s weirdly empty house at the top of the hill. Primo fumbles around to turn on the bedside lamp, which gives Leonardo the chance to get right next to him and slide his hands around Primo’s waist, under his shirt.

“Son of a bitch,” Primo hisses, twisting around in his grip to face him. “Your hands are fucking freezing, old man.”

“Warm them up for me, then.” He slides his hands higher up Primo’s stomach, backing him up against the bedside table. Primo grabs for him, to push his hands away, but he’s faster, catching hold of both of Primo’s wrists and holding on when he tries to pull away.

Primo looks down, at his big hands trapped in Leonardo’s grip, and then back up, with that look he gets, like he’s just tricked Leonardo into revealing a delicious secret. It sends a rush of heat through him.

This is why he can’t stop. Moments like this, when it feels like walking along a knife edge with Primo, and he can’t say for sure whether he’s stepping into the most dangerous place in all of Calabria, or the safest. It wakes something up in him, something reckless and hungry, the thing that Primo knew was still there, underneath the cardigans and soft belly and graying hair. The reason Primo knew that he would say yes to helping him build the port before he ever told him a word of the plan.

“Take your clothes off.” His voice already sounds wrecked.

Primo keeps holding his gaze as he strips off everything beside the bed, while Leonardo does the same. He catches Primo’s little smirk when he pulls down his trousers and Primo can see he’s half hard already.

Primo climbs onto the bed, long and lean and naked, and Leonardo straddles him. For a moment Primo just lies there, one eyebrow raised as if to say, _well?_

He takes hold of Primo’s wrists again and pins them against the sheets above his head. “Keep your hands there.”

“Or what?” Primo has to ask. Of course he does.

“Or I’ll stop.” He slides down to kiss him, filthy and deep.

He takes his sweet time, mouthing at Primo’s neck, his collarbone, his nipples. He spends time fucking him open with his fingers, two and then three, until Primo squirms his hips impatiently against the pillow he’s shoved under them.

“Get on with _uhhn—_ ” The demand disintegrates when Leonardo curls his fingers inside him. Primo always seems on the verge of laughing, when Leonardo manages to overwhelm him like that, like he can’t quite believe Leonardo would dare. It makes him want to do it all the time.

He’s rocking his hips impatiently against Leonardo’s fingers now, and it’s mesmerizing, finding the rhythm where the sensation is almost but not quite enough for him, watching him gasp and make needy little noises. Leonardo almost wants to make him come like this, except he really wants to fuck him.

Primo keeps his hands where Leonardo put them the whole time, fingers twisting into the sheets.

When he finally slides into him, he is so hot and slick and relaxed from being fucked open on his fingers, he nearly loses it right there. He takes time finding the right angle, shifting ever so slightly until he gets a shocked little “ _oh_ ” out of Primo.

“Right there, huh?” he says, rocking his hips, trying to hit the exact spot that made Primo make that noise every time. They’re both panting, sweaty against each other, Primo’s hard cock leaking against his stomach every time he rocks forward, and just as he thinks he can’t possibly last any longer, Primo is coming with a dramatic moan, spilling hot between their bodies and dragging him over the edge a couple short twitches of his hips later.

He lies there, breathing hard against Primo’s heaving chest. Primo’s arms are still draped above his head. He gropes for one and then the other and wraps them around his back. They only stay there for a minute. (To be fair, this was an awful lot of intimacy for Primo for one night.) But he’ll remember the fleeting squeeze of Primo’s fingers against his skin for days afterward.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/)


End file.
